The syntactic interface with the environment is inherited from OpenAI's Gym environment [1]} and its simple interfaces, and is thus easy to include into their pipeline of environments to test. The RL environments are developed for the widely used dVRK such that any RL-learned strategy could be applied on their platforms. Specifically, newly learned policies can be transferred onto any of the internationally networked, 40+ da Vinci Research Platforms and participating labs [2]}, including the one at UC San Diego, to encourage international collaborations and reduce the barriers for all to validate on a real world system.
